Having problems with mouse clicking, video card and drivers in general

[Guest]

Hi Guys,

I've decided I'm fed up with Windows, they wipe there buttocks with privacy. Back in the days I have used OpenSuse for a while and Ubuntu (all in all about 6 months of experience, ten years ago). After which I was forced to switch to Windows because of the lack of proper hardware (Virtual Box windows was therefor not an option). Now I have a decent set up and I'm hearing great news about steam and linux compatible gaming. To me, that means that other "Windows only" software eventually will have to become "Linux also". Since I now have a decent computer set up:

1 Intel Core i5-4670 3400 1150 BOX
1 CooMas G750M 750W ATX
1 GiBy WL M9 ICE 2000dpi schwarz LAS U
1 Enermax Thorex ATX
1 Asus DRW-24F1ST 24x SA BK B
1 SSD 1,1TB Crucial
1 CooMas R4-L2R20AC-GP 120X120X25
1 MSI B85-G41 PC Mate B85
1 Seag 2TB ST2000DM001 7200 SA3
1 D31 GB 1600-999 RipjawsX K4 GSK
2 MSI 2GB D5 X R7 260X OC V1 R
1 Crossfire cable

Kubuntu version:
Freshly Installed 16.04 (updated and dist-upgraded)

I want to use Kubuntu, VB Windows to use the software, untill it runs on Kubuntu.

However! Installing Kubuntu has been a nightmare so far...! I've begun my adventure installing Ubuntu 17.04. I've had to install it multiple times because the Grub Loader didn't load. After tinkering with the BIOS (I absolutely did not enjoy this) I found out that the Hard-Disk ITSELF had a boot order...
Grub Loader finally loaded, Ubuntu loaded. And I had Ubuntu! However I had problems with my video card. I have a crossfire cable installed to run on 4gb of GPU. I need the AMD driver and software to make use of it. And they have support for Linux!

Perfect! Installed it, rebooted, Ubuntu crashed unbootably hard...

Okay apparently I need to downgrade to version 16.04 Got that, installed it. Ubuntu crashed at the moment I saw a desktop.

Hmm... Did a little bit of research, Manjarno!!! That is the solution. High on the list for Gaming Desktops. Tried to install it, failed at installing around 80%. Three times in a row... yay...

8 Hours later I finally got Kubuntu installed, yay...

As you might understand, I'm a bit frustrated. I have a pc that is 2 years of age. It's mediocre at worst and pretty good at best. It's components I've selected to be the best with 3D designing software. Multi-threading is a thing that they do not use... Ya got 8 cores? Cool! Ya can wait 8 times longer, because we only know how to use one! I expect that when I install whatever open source operating system, that it works. However I've found out that it doesn't work with me or my computer. If I were a complete noob I'd quit a long time ago trying to install and go back to windows. But I didn't and I won't.

I desperately need help in fixing the following three problems:
I need a safe way that will not crash my computer and set my progress to square one.
Again, I have spend 8 hours at least to get Kubuntu running on a decent computer, I don't want to spend 8 additional hours on getting Kubuntu to run as it should be in the first place.

- Mouse clicking:
Kubuntu bare-boned > The mouse barely works. I can click a few times on something, But that's it, after that when I click in a window, the window becomes inactive. I click on the task bar, nothing happens. This happened in the installer also. The main installing menu was clickable, but every pop-up wasn't.
Reinstalling inputattach -> It's better, but I can't click on the task bar, or the title bars.

I've tried tinkering with unity, but I'm afraid that I mess up Kubuntu horribly, without knowing if it will actually work.

- Video card:
Crossfire is currently enabled? I think? I have four screens I normally work with, but the screens on only one video card are active. The other ones present a black screen with the Kubuntu logo.
I want to be able to enable en disable crossfire. I have no clue what to install, saw something about butterfly? catalyst? Dude, I just want the correct drivers and software, nothing more.

- Drivers in general
I don't know what driver IS installed and what driver IS NOT installed. Driver manager shows one driver... The onboard graphics card... yay... What about the rest? Nothing = Installed or didn't find it? Where can If find that out?

That's it. Nothing more. I just want a safe setting before abusing Kubuntu till she crashes.

Sincerely,
ColdDeath

[oshunluvr]

If had to guess, I suspect most of your issues are related to the video set up. The mouse is related to xorg so xorg issues could cause mouse weirdness.

Unfortunately, despite all your issues, there's very little in your post in the way of real information - at least with regards to troubleshooting problems. So lets start at the beginning...

GRUB: If you're not going to have Windows on bare metal (installed to a hard drive), then GRUB is much easier. Still, you need to know:

1. EFI or Legacy (non-EFI) booting?
2. MBR or GPT formatting?
3. Which drive is the boot drive?

GRUB can boot EFI style or Legacy style, but the setups are entirely different.
MBR (old style, but still common) partitioning/formatting is fine, but different than GPT (new style) and grub needs different things from either style.
Knowing which drive is the boot drive is important for obvious reasons. I see you have two drives. The best setup is to make both drives bootable to make recovery easier for a possible "oh crap" moment.

I assume you're booting to USB media OK? So boot up, first to BIOS and determine 1 and 3, then boot to the USB and open a terminal. There, type "lsblk". This will list your drives by device name. Then do "sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdX" replacing the X each time with the letter that represents each drive. This will let us know how your drives are partitioned. If it's all new and you don't care about anything on them - then we can lay tracks to get you down the best path.

Next, you might consider removing one of the video cards for now. Also, if your CPU/Mobo support video, make sure it's disabled in the BIOS. This will help during initial install. Once you're more comfortable with Linux and what you might have to do to get SLI working, you won't have to do that again.

I can say that I have installed Kubuntu 16.04, KDEneon, Manjaro, and Ubuntu (and they're all still here) all on this machine without any problems - but I have almost 20 years using Linux so I've been down all those roads you're on right now.

As far as "playing" with Unity or another DE on your Kubuntu install - in theory, you can do it, but it often leads to issues. I would recommend either multi-booting several installs or using VirtualBox - I do both.

To troubleshoot your video and find out what driver is loaded - I assume you meant video driver - your current video system, xorg, logs it's actions in /var/log/Xorg.0.log at every boot up. Once you're booted, a simple terminal command will reveal your video driver: cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log |grep Driver